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Sunday, September 09, 2007

Adventures in FamilySearch Indexing - Week 7

Well it's Sunday and it's been a long busy day. I went to church, came home had no nap and then off to the BYU FHL to take some classes. I came home tired and ready to go to bed but - nope I had my indexing to do. I debated waiting until tomorrow to do my batch but I really hate to break a record when I'm on one. I sat down, signed into KZION for mood music and went right to work indexing.

My mystery download was the Louisiana 1900 U.S. Federal Census. I was really surprised to not get Tennessee because that's usually what I get. I even looked and Tennessee is still not finished so I don't know why they didn't want me all of a sudden. I guess I just have this thing about Tennessee and I don't even have relatives there - that I know of!

I did run across a "no name" person - he was a younger child in the family. Then I had a wife called "Ma", and a son Claud that was listed as a "F" for female. For the "no name" person I marked the field blank. For the wife I entered "Ma" for the given name. Claud that was listed as a SON did get entered as a female. I sure hope I did them all right because that's how I understood the directions to enter them.

In last week's article on indexing I posted a query from a reader.

Hello,

I am on dialup service for my internet and have been told that it is not conducive to doing the indexing project. I would be interested to know if there are current indexers that use dialup for their service and how it works for them.

Don

Well, we got a response!

Hi Renee,I read on your blog about a person with dialup access to internet, who would like to index but has been told dialup is not conducive to indexing. I am the Stake Extraction/Indexing Director in my area and we have several (maybe 5 or 6) who index with dial up. Yes, it does take longer to download, and up load. But they work around that by starting the download process and then going off to load the laundry or some other small task then come back to work on it when it is finished downloading. It is not impossible -- just not as easy. The workers here often download more than one batch while they are "connected" then can work offline at their convenience. Also Stake Directors should make a CD of the program so those with dialup do not have to be "connected" to the internet for 3 1/2 hours while the program is getting downloaded to their computers. It only takes about 16 minutes with the CD.Peggy

I really appreciate Peggy giving us this insight in to working with dialup service while indexing. If you have any experiences you would like to share about indexing send me an email at: zamora05@hotmail.com

Now it's time for bed and it's been a day well done. I indexed 50 names tonight, making a grand total of 424 names indexed. It's been 7 weeks and it seems so little but I'm at least helping in the over-all figures. Every name indexed is one step closer to another family member being found. Even though I didn't index my family members - somewhere out there someone indexed my 1900 Queensbury, Warren Co., New York family members and I really appreciate that.